Daily Archives: February 22, 2012

Note: Savonarola is some sort of obscure reference from the 1400s. My editor suggested we use it with the idea it would increase my intellectual gravitas. It was a good call. Originally, I had called Santorum a latter-day Nazi.

Why do I call Santorum any name at all or for that matter, even give him the time of day? Isn’t it obvious? With the Romney and Gingrich fades, Santorum is now a credible threat to my President’s re-election and I must therefore perform my ad hominem duties. For what it’s worth, my editor also pointed out that because of these ridiculous reductio ad hitlerum rules, I instead need to call Santorum a small-town mullah. It’ll have to do.

With that out of the way, Rick Santorum is a small-town mullah.

“Obama has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Obama is attacking the great institutions of America, using those vices of envy, government power, slothfulness, vanity, and even sensuality to attack the American tradition.”

When did sensuality become a vice? Next he’ll be banning one of the leading men from my childhood, Rudolph Valentino.

Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “Obama has his sights on what you would think he would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”

The “Obama phenomenon” hit, one Democratic campaigner told me, when there are “soul wounds” in America like Bush-fatigue or even more so, with someone like John McCain leading the Republican ticket. Santorum, who is considered “mondo Catholic” has even obliquely and unfavorably compared President Obama to Hitler (didn’t he get the reductio ad hitlerum memo?) and accused him (Obama, not Hitler) of having “bogus theology.”

Santorum didn’t go as far as evangelist Franklin Graham, who having observed the President for three full years, doubted the president’s Christianity on “My Mourning Joe.”

Mullah Rick (yes, we checked. Muslim references are still OK) even told ABC News’s Jake Tapper that he disagreed with some Supreme Court decisions. And, in October, he said that contraception “has become a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Oh, behave!

Senator Sanitarium, as he was dubbed by the culturally-significant “The Simpsons,” sometimes tries to temper his retrogressive sermons so as not to drive away women who don’t automatically vote Democrat (and therefore deserve to serve out their days hand-scrubbing crumbling linoleum floors, barefoot and with child on hip, and wearing 70s era clothes). He shockingly told The Washington Post that, while he doesn’t want to fund contraception through the Abort America! franchises, he wouldn’t ban it: “The idea that I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case.”

That doesn’t comfort me because as I mentioned, Santorum has become a threat to my President and action, more action, must be taken. I’ve spent a career (note how I deftly made the emphasis on my career versus my lifetime?) watching candidates deny they would do things to interns including the patron saints of male control–in a good way in these cases–Bill Clinton and JFK. What did they do? They went on to fulfill their personal desires (but hey, they’re Democrats… it isn’t that big a deal. Hypocrisy only works one way. Let it go, Republicans, let it go).

The AOL/Huffington Post–an excellent and highly recommended source for all your information needs, should the Times fold, fail to achieve a bailout, and I find myself in the need for work–reports that Santorum told Philadelphia Magazine in 1995 that he “was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress.” Then, he said, he read the “scientific literature.”

It simply isn’t possible that anyone could believe such pap, so Santorum must have cynically decided electoral gold lies in the ruthless exploitation of social and cultural wedge issues (and unlike anyone who embraces the opposing side of these issues, all that is good and right). Unlike the Bushes, who are to blame for all wrong in the world, Santorum has no hit squad; instead, he confronts things himself.

Why is it that Republicans don’t want government involved when it comes to the economy (opposing the auto bailouts) but they also want government to quit telling people how to live their lives by having freedom, the law as king, and free markets? It’s a mystery to me.

Can’t Santorum instead become hooah for men like Obama, LBJ, and Jimmy Carter who heroically helped create dependency, unemployment, inflation, the fatherless European welfare state, and massive government debt? Santorum, it seems, has become successful simply because he’s not ashamed to admit that he wants to take the country backward (of course, he defines “backward” as “not Obama, LBJ, or Carter”).

A potential threat to my Vice President is Virginia’s governor, Bob McDonnell, touted as a Republican vice presidential prospect. This week, pro-abortion forces made the Virginia Legislature pause on its way to passing a bill forcing women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Abortion favoring Democratic Delegate Latrell Sprewell hotly argued that the bill might “reduce abortions among women and people of color,” adding “I cannot believe that you would disrespect unborn children… I mean fetuses, in a manner reminiscent of a TSA screening,” he chided colleagues. “This legislation is simply mean-spirited, and it is bullying, bullying quite unlike the President’s decision to force Catholic institutions to fund abortions against their beliefs.”

In the meantime, the Democratic-controlled Maryland House of Delegates just passed a bill that would allow homosexual marriage, state-sanctioned incest, polygamy, and bestiality. Conversely, the Republican-controlled Virginia Legislature passed a bill allowing private adoption agencies to keep these heroic homosexuals, it’s-all-in-the-family types, way-open marriages, and “Here, Rover” folks from lovingly share their homes with full-term fetuses… I mean, children.

McClatchy quotes sources who blame speculators for driving up the price of oil and gasoline and draws this conclusion:

Not surprisingly, big Wall Street traders on Tuesday projected oil will rise above $112 a barrel; some such as Swiss giant Vitol even suggested $150-a-barrel oil is coming soon. When they dominate the market, as they do, speculators’ bids can make their prophecies self-fulfilling.

Yes, animal spirits exist in the market. But the cure, more government control (of a globally traded commodity… not sure how that would work, except to say poorly) is worse than the “disease” (you’re right, those are sneer quotes) of speculation and free markets.

McClatchy also forgets to address several things:

U.S. demand (which has gone down slightly) does not equal worldwide demand (which is only peripherally addressed).

When the value of a dollar decreases, it takes more dollars to buy a barrel of oil (all other things remaining constant, which they rarely do).

How do the evil speculators differ from the financial institutions or GM and Chrysler (which all rolled the dice, lost, and were bailed out)? Or for that matter, from those who fail to work or to save for retirement because the government will take care of them?